page_title: Nihilism
section_title: Russian movement
hierarchical_section_title: Nihilism / Forms / Political / Russian movement
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Студент-нигилист
context_page_description: Nihilism refers to a number of different views in philosophy, all of which express some form of philosophical pessimism about the nature of human life. Different forms of nihilism hold variously that human values are baseless, that life is meaningless, that knowledge is impossible, or that some set of entities does not exist.
  Most commonly, nihilism refers to existential nihilism, according to which life is believed to be without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. Moral nihilism asserts that nothing is morally right or wrong. Among others, nihilism may also take the form of epistemological nihilism, according to which knowledge is impossible, and a number of metaphysical forms of nihilism, which assert that composite objects do not exist, that necessary objects do not exist, or even that reality itself does not exist.
  The term is sometimes used in association with anomie to explain the general mood of despair at a perceived pointlessness of existence that one may develop upon realising there are no necessary norms, rules, or laws.
  Nihilism has also been described as conspicuous in or constitutive of certain historical periods.
context_section_description: The Russian nihilist movement was a revolutionary cultural and political movement in Russia from 1860 to 1917 and was a precursor to other forms of philosophical nihilism. In Russian, the word nigilizm (Russian: нигилизм; meaning 'nihilism', from Latin  nihil, meaning 'nothing at all') was so used "because 'nothing' that then existed found favor in their eyes." Even as it was yet unnamed, the movement arose from a generation of young radicals disillusioned with the social reformers of the past, and from a growing divide between the gentry and non-gentry intelligentsia.
  
  Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, as stated in the Encyclopædia Britannica, "defined nihilism as the symbol of struggle against all forms of tyranny, hypocrisy, and artificiality and for individual freedom". After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, Russian nihilism was mischaracterised throughout Europe as political terrorism and as the explicit use of violence in order to bring about political change.
  The Nihilists expressed anger at what they described as the abusive nature of the Eastern Orthodox Church and of the tsarist monarchy, and at the domination of the Russian economy by the aristocracy. Although the term Nihilism was coined by German theologian Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1818), its widespread usage began with the 1862 novel Fathers and Sons by Russian author Ivan Turgenev. The main character of the novel, Yevgeny Bazarov, who describes himself as a Nihilist, wants to educate the people. 
  The "go to the people – be the people" campaign reached its height in the 1870s, during which underground groups such as the Circle of Tchaikovsky, the People's Will, and Land and Liberty formed. It became known as the Narodnik movement, whose members believed that the newly-freed serfs were merely being sold into wage slavery in the onset of the Industrial Revolution, and that the middle and upper classes had effectively replaced landowners. The Russian state attempted to suppress the nihilist movement. In actions described by the Nihilists as propaganda of the deed many government officials were assassinated. In 1881 Alexander II was killed on the very day he had approved a proposal to call a representative assembly to consider new reforms.
caption: Portrait of a nihilist student by Ilya Repin
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